David Adjaye, Freelon Group tapped for D.C.’s African American Museum

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A team headed by the British architect David Adjaye and North Carolina’s Freelon Group today won a high-profile competition for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum will occupy an unusually prominent 5-acre parcel of land on the National Mall, near the Washington Monument. If current planning restrictions hold, it will be the last national monument or museum allowed on the Mall itself.

The winning proposal -- which remains preliminary -- calls for a largely horizontal building topped by a pair of inverted trapezoid forms and wrapped in perforated metal screens. It prevailed over designs by Britain’s Foster + Partners, New York’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others.

The news gives another boost to the remarkable acceleration of Adjaye’s career. Born in 1966, he remains quite young by architectural standards, and has seen his stock rise in the U.S. quickly in the last several years. His Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver opened in 2007, and he is at work on a pair of public libraries in Washington, building on the success of his ‘idea stores’ in the U.K. He first became known for a series of residential projects in London, many designed for artists.

Adjaye was born in Tanzania, where his Ghanian father was working as a diplomat, and as a child moved with his family to London. In that sense, his connection to African American history, like Barack Obama’s, has an emphasis on the African part of the equation. He has been carrying out extensive research in recent years on African architecture. The screens and other elements of the winning museum proposal are in part drawn from African precedents.

He will be the lead designer on a team that -- along with the Freelon Group, which designed the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco -- includes New York firm Davis Brody Bond and SmithGroup. Construction on the $500 million museum is set to begin in 2012 and be completed in 2015.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Credits: Design renderings courtesy Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup